I love when someone sums up a deep truth, in a simple way.
Especially when it involves rebellious bees. 🐝

There’s a constant struggle between creative agencies and marketing departments.

The creatives stay awake at night dreaming of campaigns that cut-through. The marketers stay awake, wondering how they’ll explain this campaign to dozens of corporate stakeholders. Generally, this leads to clients exploiting the safety of what they know, over exploring what they don’t.

Rory Sutherland – Vice President at Ogilvy UK – suggests that these companies should act a little more like bees;

“20% of bees ignore the waggle dance and go off at random, but they report back what they find. So 80% are exploiting what they know, and 20% are updating the waggle dance with new information. If they don’t have the random bees, they get trapped in a local maximum and the hive starves to death. Also, they never get lucky. They never have a chance of discovering something new…"

"We should be taking budgets and dividing it into - Exploit what we know / Explore what we don’t.”

So practically, what does 20% of “Explore what we don’t know” look like for advertising?

Well, every concept deck, created by an ambitious creative agency, contains at least one wild idea. You’ll know it when your brain says, “Woah, that’s cool… We could never do it.”

What if 1/5 times you could?

Here's my challenge to corporate stakeholders. Trust your Marketing departments. When they see an opportunity to explore, back them, take the learnings and update the company waggle dance.

Sure, no one ever gets fired for being sensible. But being sensible 100% of the time, doesn’t really make much sense.